Transphobia
Encyclopedia
Transphobia is a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards transsexualism
Transsexualism
Transsexualism is an individual's identification with a gender inconsistent or not culturally associated with their biological sex. Simply put, it defines a person whose biological birth sex conflicts with their psychological gender...

 and transsexual or transgender
Transgender
Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles....

 people, based on the expression of their internal gender identity (see Phobia – terms indicating prejudice or class discrimination). Whether intentional or not, transphobia can have severe consequences for the target of the negative attitude. Many trans people also experience homophobia
Homophobia
Homophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards lesbian, gay and in some cases bisexual, transgender people and behavior, although these are usually covered under other terms such as biphobia and transphobia. Definitions refer to irrational fear, with the...

 from people who associate their gender identity
Gender identity
A gender identity is the way in which an individual self-identifies with a gender category, for example, as being either a man or a woman, or in some cases being neither, which can be distinct from biological sex. Basic gender identity is usually formed by age three and is extremely difficult to...

 with homosexuality
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...

. Attacking someone on the basis of a perception of their gender identity
Gender identity
A gender identity is the way in which an individual self-identifies with a gender category, for example, as being either a man or a woman, or in some cases being neither, which can be distinct from biological sex. Basic gender identity is usually formed by age three and is extremely difficult to...

 rather the perception of their sexual orientation
Sexual orientation
Sexual orientation describes a pattern of emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to the opposite sex, the same sex, both, or neither, and the genders that accompany them. By the convention of organized researchers, these attractions are subsumed under heterosexuality, homosexuality,...

 is known as "trans bashing", as opposed to "gay bashing
Gay bashing
Gay bashing and gay bullying is verbal or physical abuse against a person who is perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender . Such abuse is used also to bully heterosexual persons and persons of non-specific or unknown sexual orientation.A "bashing" may be a specific incident, and one...

".

Examples

Transgender activists point to many instances in many of its different forms and manifestations throughout society. Some instances clearly involve violence and extreme malice, while others involve little more than a lack of understanding or experience of the condition, sometimes involving unconscious predisposition based upon various religious edicts or social conventions.

Difficulties encountered by transgender people

Sometimes homeless shelters and prisons have engaged in practices that have a demeaning impact on transwomen, refusing, for example, admission to women's areas and forcing them to sleep and bathe in the presence of men. This situation has been changing in some areas, however. For example, on February 8, 2006, New York City's Department of Homeless Services announced an overhaul of its housing policy with the goal of specifically ending discrimination against transgender people in its shelters.

Notable victims of violent crimes motivated by transphobia include Brandon Teena
Brandon Teena
Brandon Teena was an American trans man who was raped and murdered in Humboldt, Nebraska. His life and death were the subject of the Academy Award-winning 1999 film Boys Don't Cry, which was based on the documentary film The Brandon Teena Story.-Life:Teena was born Teena Renae Brandon in Lincoln,...

, Gwen Araujo
Gwen Araujo
Gwen Amber Rose Araujo , born Edward Araujo, Jr., an American teenage pre-operative transgender woman, was murdered in Newark, California, in October 2002. She was killed by four men, with two of whom she had been sexually intimate, who beat and strangled her after discovering she was transgender...

, Angie Zapata
Angie Zapata
Angie Zapata was an American trans woman beaten to death in Greeley, Colorado. Allen Andrade was convicted of first-degree murder and committing a bias-motivated crime, because he killed her after he learned that she was transgender. The case was the first in the nation to get a conviction for a...

, Nizah Morris
Nizah Morris
Nizah Morris was an American transgender entertainer. On December 22, 2002 Morris suffered a severe head injury from which she did not recover. Morris died on December 24, 2002, at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, when she was removed from life support...

, and Lauren Harries
Lauren Harries
Lauren Charlotte Harries , is a British media personality. In childhood Harries was known as James, a purported "child prodigy" in the field of antiques, appearing on numerous television shows including Wogan...

.

Transphobia in healthcare

Transgender people depend largely on the medical profession to receive not only hormone replacement therapy, but also vital care. In one case, Robert Eads
Robert Eads
Robert Eads was an American transsexual man, whose life and death was the subject of the award-winning documentary Southern Comfort.- Transition :...

 died of ovarian cancer after being refused treatment by more than two dozen doctors.

Another example of this is the case of Tyra Hunter
Tyra Hunter
Tyra Hunter was an African-American transsexual woman who died after being injured as a passenger in a car accident and refused medical care...

. Ms. Hunter was involved in an automobile accident, and when rescue workers
Emergency medical services
Emergency medical services are a type of emergency service dedicated to providing out-of-hospital acute medical care and/or transport to definitive care, to patients with illnesses and injuries which the patient, or the medical practitioner, believes constitutes a medical emergency...

 discovered she was transgender, they backed away and stopped administering treatment. She later died in hospital.

Transphobia in employment

Transphobia also manifests itself in the workplace. Some transsexuals lose their jobs when they begin to transition. A study from Willamette University
Willamette University
Willamette University is an American private institution of higher learning located in Salem, Oregon. Founded in 1842, it is the oldest university in the Western United States. Willamette is a member of the Annapolis Group of colleges, and is made up of an undergraduate College of Liberal Arts and...

 stated that a transsexual fired for following the recommended course of treatment rarely wins it back through federal or state statutes.

News stories from the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...

and Associated Press
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...

 cite a 1999 study by the San Francisco Department of Public Health finding a 70 percent unemployment
Unemployment
Unemployment , as defined by the International Labour Organization, occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively sought work within the past four weeks...

 rate amongst the city's transgender population. On February 18, 1999, the San Francisco Department of Public Health issued the results of a 1997 survey of 392 MTF (male-to-female) and 123 FTM (female-to-male) transgender people, which found that 40 percent of those MTF transgender people surveyed had earned money from full or part-time employment over the preceding six months. For FTMs, the equivalent statistic was 81 percent. The survey also found that 46 percent of MTFs and 57 percent of FTMs reported employment discrimination.

In the hiring process, discrimination may be either open or covert, with employers finding other ostensible reasons not to hire a candidate or just not informing prospective employees at all as to why they are not being hired. Additionally, when an employer fires or otherwise discriminates against a transgender employee, it may be a "mixed motive" case, with the employer openly citing obvious wrongdoing, job performance issues or the like (such as excessive tardiness, for example) while keeping silent in regards to transphobia.

Employment discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression is illegal in some U.S. cities, towns and states. Such discrimination is outlawed by specific legislation in the State of New Jersey and might be in other states (as it is in the states of California, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico and Washington) or city ordinances; additionally, it is covered by case law in some other states. (For example, Massachusetts is covered by cases such as Lie vs. Sky Publishing Co. and Jette vs. Honey Farms.) Several other states and cities prohibit such discrimination in public employment. Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 and the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 has also legislated against employment discrimination on the grounds of gender identity
Gender identity
A gender identity is the way in which an individual self-identifies with a gender category, for example, as being either a man or a woman, or in some cases being neither, which can be distinct from biological sex. Basic gender identity is usually formed by age three and is extremely difficult to...

. Sometimes, however, employers discriminate against transgender employees in spite of such legal protections.

There is at least one high-profile employment-related court case unfavorable to transgender people. In 2000, the southern U.S. grocery chain Winn-Dixie fired longtime employee Peter Oiler, despite a history of repeatedly earning raises and promotions, after management learned that the married, heterosexual truck driver occasionally cross-dressed off the job. Management argued that this hurt Winn-Dixie's corporate image. The American Civil Liberties Union
American Civil Liberties Union
The American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...

 filed a lawsuit against Winn-Dixie on behalf of Oiler but a judge dismissed it. The case, however, led to a picket of the company's Jacksonville, Florida
Jacksonville, Florida
Jacksonville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Florida in terms of both population and land area, and the largest city by area in the contiguous United States. It is the county seat of Duval County, with which the city government consolidated in 1968...

, headquarters and a boycott against the company.

Sometimes transgendered people facing employment discrimination turn to sex work
Sex industry
The sex industry consists of businesses which either directly or indirectly provide sex-related products and services or adult entertainment...

 to survive, placing them at additional risk of such things as encountering troubles with the law, including arrest and criminal prosecution; enduring workplace violence; and possibly contracting sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted disease , also known as a sexually transmitted infection or venereal disease , is an illness that has a significant probability of transmission between humans by means of human sexual behavior, including vaginal intercourse, oral sex, and anal sex...

s such as HIV
HIV
Human immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...

.

Transprejudice

Transprejudice is a similar term to transphobia, and refers to the negative valuing, stereotyping, and discriminatory treatment of individuals whose appearance and/or identity does not conform to current social expectations or conventional conceptions of gender.

Transprejudice may be manifested in ways similar to other prejudicial beliefs, such as homophobia
Homophobia
Homophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards lesbian, gay and in some cases bisexual, transgender people and behavior, although these are usually covered under other terms such as biphobia and transphobia. Definitions refer to irrational fear, with the...

 or sexual prejudice. As Blumenfeld (1992) suggests, homophobia functions on four distinct, yet interrelated, levels: personal, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural (also referred to as collective or societal). Adapting Blumenfeld’s framework for use with transprejudice, personal transprejudice would refer to an individual’s belief system (prejudices) about transgender and transsexual individuals. Interpersonal transprejudice would be evident when a personal prejudice transforms into discriminatory behavior. Institutional transprejudice would be seen in the ways in which government, business, religious, educational, and professional organizations (e.g., the medical and psychiatric community) systematically discriminate against transgender and transsexual individuals. Finally, cultural transprejudice would refer to the social cognition that influences attitudes toward transgender and transsexual persons.

Transphobia in the lesbian, gay and bisexual community

Some members of the LGBT
LGBT
LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

 communities are uncomfortable with transgender individuals and issues. For example, trans women
Trans woman
A trans woman is a male-to-female transsexual or transgender person and the term trans woman is preferred by some individuals over various medical terms. Other non-medical terms include t-girl, tg-girl and ts-girl...

 (male-to-female transgender and transsexual people) are sometimes denied entry to women's spaces, an attitude which Transgender activists consider to be transphobic. The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival
Michigan Womyn's Music Festival
The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, called "the Original Womyn's Woodstock" and often referred to as MWMF or Michfest, is an international feminist music festival occurring every August since 1976 near Hart, Michigan...

, for instance, has caused much debate for limiting its attendance to "womyn
Womyn
"Womyn" is one of a number of alternative spellings of the word "women" used by some feminist writers. There are many alternative spellings, including "wimmin", "womban", "wom!n"...

-born womyn". Kay Brown of transhistory.net (“Transsexual, Transgender and Intersex History” - nomore online) has set forth a long chronology of the ejection of those whom we now know as “transgendered” from gay organizations starting in the 1970s.

Some trans men face ostracism and rejection from lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...

 communities they had been part of prior to transition. Journalist Louise Rafkin writes, "There are those who are feeling curiously uncomfortable standing by as friends morph into men. Sometimes there is a generational flavor to this discomfort; many in the over-40 crowd feel particular unease." Trans men were part of the protest at the 2000 Michigan Womyn's Music Festival
Michigan Womyn's Music Festival
The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, called "the Original Womyn's Woodstock" and often referred to as MWMF or Michfest, is an international feminist music festival occurring every August since 1976 near Hart, Michigan...

, "the first time the 'womyn-born womyn only' policy has been used against trannie boys, boydykes, FTM's, Lesbian Avengers
Lesbian Avengers
The Lesbian Avengers began in New York City in 1992 as "a direct action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility." Dozens of other chapters quickly emerged worldwide, a few expanding their mission to include questions of gender, race, and class.Though some groups continue...

 and young gender-variant women."

In the early 1970s, conflicts began to emerge due to different syntheses of lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...

, feminist and transgender
Transgender
Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles....

 political movements, particularly in the United States. San Francisco activist and entertainer Beth Elliott became the focus of debate over whether to include transsexual lesbians in the movement, and she was eventually blacklisted by her own movement.

While many gays and lesbians feel that transgender is simply a name for a part of their own community (i.e. the LGBT
LGBT
LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

 community), others actively reject the idea that transgender people are part of their community, seeing them as entirely separate and distinct. Some feel that bisexuality and transgender
Transgender
Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles....

ism are detrimental to the social and political acceptance of gays and lesbians.

The nature of the terms man and woman also become unclear in a similar way under this philosophy, and many feel that the only real recourse is to accept that the mind and feeling of a person is the only thing that gives that person identity, and so a person that has a female identity and mind is indeed a woman. According to this thinking, it becomes clear that in at least a categorical sense, transgendered people should only be accepted in the gay
Gay
Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

 and lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...

 community if they themselves self-identify as gay or lesbian as any other homosexual person does, and the blanket assumption on the part of some gay and lesbian people on the nature of those transgendered people who are in their LGB
LGBT
LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

 community with a view to dis-inclusion constitutes an issue of transphobia. The implacability of this question has been overcome by the rise in the 1990s of queer theory
Queer theory
Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...

 and the queer
Queer
Queer is an umbrella term for sexual minorities that are not heterosexual, heteronormative, or gender-binary. In the context of Western identity politics the term also acts as a label setting queer-identifying people apart from discourse, ideologies, and lifestyles that typify mainstream LGBT ...

 community, which defines queer as embracing all variants of sexual identity, sexual desire, and sexual acts that fall outside normative definitions of heterosexuality; thus a heterosexual man or woman as well as a transgender person of any sex can be included in the category of queer through their own choice.

See also

  • List of transgender-related topics
  • Transgender Day of Remembrance
    Transgender Day of Remembrance
    Transgender Day of Remembrance is a day to memorialize those who have been killed as a result of transphobia, or the hatred or fear of transgender and gender non-conforming people, and acts to bring attention to the continued violence endured by the transgender community.The Transgender Day of...

  • Violence against LGBT people
  • List of unlawfully killed transgender people
  • Transprejudice
  • Transfeminism
    Transfeminism
    Robert Hill defines Transfeminism as "a category of feminism, most often known for the application of transgender discourses to feminist discourses, and of feminist beliefs to transgender discourse". Hill says that transfeminism also concerns its integration within mainstream feminism...

  • Transgender Law Center
    Transgender Law Center
    The Transgender Law Center is a San Francisco-based civil rights organization advocating for transgender communities. They are California's first "fully staffed, state-wide transgender legal organization" and were initially a fiscally sponsored project of the National Center for Lesbian Rights...

  • Trans bashing
  • The Yogyakarta Principles
  • LGBT rights opposition
    LGBT rights opposition
    LGBT rights opposition refers to active opposition to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender civil rights. Organizations influential in LGBT rights opposition frequently challenge judicial rulings, and legislative initiatives, and dispute findings that sexual orientation is an immutable...

  • Hate crime
    Hate crime
    In crime and law, hate crimes occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, social status or...

  • Janice Raymond
    Janice Raymond
    Janice G. Raymond is a longtime feminist activist against violence, sexual exploitation and the "medical abuse" of cissexual women, as well as for her writings and activism against transsexualism...

  • Julie Bindel
    Julie Bindel
    Julie Bindel is an English writer, feminist and co-founder of the group Justice For Women, which opposes violence against women from a feminist viewpoint....

  • Global Action for Trans Equality
    Global Action for Trans Equality
    Global Action for Trans* Equality is an organisation and think tank for transsexuals' or transgender's dignity and rights founded in 2009...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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